A high wall and a stretch of leafy street and another high wall away, the Colm’s boarders are back too. Chris Harper has thrown his red duvet onto his bed, his clothes into his strip of wardrobe, singing the dirty version of the school song in his new rough-edged deep voice, grinning when his roommates join in and add the gestures. He’s stuck a couple of posters over his bed, put the new framed family photo on his bedside table; he’s wrapped that packed-with-promise plastic bag in a ratty old towel and tucked it deep in his suitcase, shoved the case far back on top of the wardrobe. He’s checked the swoop of his fringe in their mirror and he’s galloping down to dinner with Finn Carroll and Harry Bailey, the three of them all shouts and extra-loud laughs and taking up the whole corridor, dead-arming and wrestling experimentally to find out who’s got strongest over the summer. Chris Harper is all ready for this year, he can’t wait; he’s got plans.
He has eight months and two weeks left to live.
‘Now what?’ Julia asks, when they’ve finished their fruit salad and put their trays on the rack. From the mysterious inner kitchen comes the clatter of washing up, and an argument in some language that might be Polish.
‘Whatever we want,’ Selena says, ‘till study time. Sometimes the shopping centre, or if the Colm’s guys have a rugby match we can go watch that, but we can’t leave the grounds till next weekend. So we can go to the common room, or . . .’
She’s already drifting towards the outside door, with Becca beside her. Holly and Julia follow them.
It’s still bright out. The grounds are layers of green, unrolling on and on. Up until now they’ve been a zone Holly and Julia aren’t really supposed to enter; not off limits, not exactly, but the only chance day-girls get is during lunch hour and there’s never time. Now it feels like a sheet of foggy glass has fallen away from in front of them: every colour is leaping, every birdcall is separate and vivid on Holly’s ear, the furls of shadow between branches look deep and cool as wells. ‘Come on,’ Selena says, and takes off running down the back lawn like she owns it. Becca is already after her. Julia and Holly run, throwing themselves into the whirl of green and whistle, to catch up.
Past the curly iron gate and into the trees, and all of a sudden the grounds are a swirl of little paths that Holly never knew about, paths that don’t belong just a corner away from a main road: sunspots, flutters, crisscrossing branches overhead and splashes of purple flowers catching in the corners of your eyes. Up and off the path, Becca’s dark plait and Selena’s stream of gold swinging in unison as they turn, up a tiny hillside past bushes that look like they’ve been clipped into neat balls by elf gardeners, and then: out of the light-and-dark dapple, into clean sun. For a second Holly has to put her hands around her eyes.
The clearing is small, just a circle of short grass ringed by tall cypresses. The air is instantly and utterly different, still and cool, with tiny eddies moving here and there. Sounds drop into it – a wood-dove’s lazy coo, the fizz of insects about their business somewhere – and disappear without leaving a ripple.
Selena says, only a little out of breath, ‘We come here.’
‘You never showed us this place before,’ Holly says. Selena and Becca glance at each other and shrug. For a second, Holly feels almost betrayed – Selena and Becca have been boarding for two years, but it never occurred to her that they would have separate stuff together – until she realises that now she’s part of it too.
‘Sometimes you feel like you’re going to go crazy if you don’t go somewhere private,’ Becca says. ‘We come here.’ She drops down on the grass in a spider-tangle of skinny legs and looks up anxiously at Holly and Julia. Her hands are cupped together tight, like she’s offering them the glade for their welcome present and isn’t sure it’s going to be good enough.
‘It’s great,’ Holly says. She smells cut grass, the rich earth in the shadows; a trace of something wild, like animals trot silently through here on their road from one nighttime place to another. ‘And nobody else ever comes?’
‘They’ve got their own places,’ Selena says. ‘We don’t go there.’
Julia turns, head tilted back to watch birds wheeling in the circle of blue, in and out of their V. ‘I like it,’ she says. ‘I like it a lot,’ and she drops down on the grass next to Becca. Becca grins and lets her breath out, and her hands loosen.
They stretch out, shift till the slipping sun is out of their eyes. The grass is dense and glossy, like some animal’s pelt, good to lie on. ‘God, McKenna’s speech,’ Julia says. ‘“Your daughters already have such a wonderful head start in life because you’re all so literate and health-conscious and cultured and just super-awesome all over, and we’re so totally thrilled to have the chance to continue your good work,” and pass the puke bag.’
‘It’s the same speech every year,’ Becca says. ‘Every single word.’
‘In first year my dad almost took me straight home because of that speech,’ Selena says. ‘He says it’s elitist.’ Selena’s dad lives on some commune place in Kilkenny and wears handwoven ponchos. Her mum picked Kilda’s.
‘My dad was thinking the same thing,’ Holly says. ‘I could see it. I was terrified he was going to say something smart-arsed when McKenna finished, but Mum stood on his foot.’
‘It totally was elitist,’ Julia says. ‘So? There’s nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it’s not doesn’t make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick. What made me want to puke was the fawning. Like we’re these products our parents shat out, and McKenna’s patting all their heads and telling them what a good job they did, and they’re wagging their tails and licking her hand and just about peeing on the floor. How does she even know? What if my parents never read a book in their lives, and they feed me deep-fried Mars bars for every meal?’
‘She doesn’t care,’ Becca says. ‘She just wants to make them feel good about spending a load of money to get rid of us.’
There’s a snip of silence. Becca’s parents work in Dubai most of the time. They didn’t make it back for today; the housekeeper brought Becca in.
‘This is good,’ Selena says. ‘You being here.’
‘It doesn’t feel real yet,’ Holly says, which is only sort of true but is the best she can do. It feels real in flashes, between long grainy stretches of dizzy static, but those flashes are vivid enough that they throw every other kind of real out of her head and it feels like she’s never been anywhere else but here. Then they’re gone.
‘Does to me,’ Becca says. She’s smiling up at the sky. The bruise has faded out of her voice.
‘It will,’ says Selena. ‘It takes a while.’
They lie there, feeling their bodies sink deeper into the glade and change rhythm to blend with the things around them: the tink tink tink of a bird somewhere, the slow slide and blink of sunbeams through the thick cypresses. Holly realises she’s flipping through the day, the way she does every afternoon on the bus home, picking out bits for telling: a funny story with a bit of boldness in it for Dad, something to impress Mum or – if Holly’s pissed off with her, which it seems like she mostly is these days – something to shock her into letting a reaction slip out: Sweet Lord, Holly, why would anyone want to say such a . . . while Holly rolls her eyes to heaven. It hits her that there’s no point in doing that now. The picture each day leaves behind isn’t going to be given its shape by Dad’s grin and Mum’s lifting eyebrows, not any more.
Instead it’ll be shaped by the others. Holly looks at them and feels today shifting, fitting itself into the outlines she’ll remember in twenty years’ time, fifty: the day Julia came up with the Daleks, the day Selena and Becca brought her and Julia to the cypress glade.
‘We better go in soon,’ Becca says, without moving.
‘It’s early,’ Julia says. ‘You said we’re allowed to do whatever we want.’
‘We can, mostly. When you’re new, though, they get hyper about being able to see you all the time. Like you might run away otherwise.’
They laugh, softly, into the circle of still air. That flash hits Holly again – thread of wild-goose calls strung high across the sky, her fingers woven deep into the cool pelt of grass, flutter of Selena’s lashes against the sun and this has been forever, everything else is a daydream falling away over the horizon. This time it lasts.
A few minutes later Selena says, ‘Becs is right, though. We should go. If they come looking for us . . .’
If a teacher came into the glade: the thought squirms in their spines, pokes them up off the grass. They brush themselves off; Becca picks fragments of green out of Selena’s hair and finger-combs it into place. ‘I need to finish unpacking anyway,’ Julia says.
‘Me too,’ Holly says. She thinks of the boarders’ wing, the high ceilings that feel ready to fill up with cold airy nun-voice harmonies. It seems like there’s someone new hovering by the yellow-striped bed, waiting for her moment: a new her; a new all of them. She feels the change seeping through her skin, whirling in the vast spaces between her atoms. Suddenly she understands what Julia was doing at dinner, poking Joanne. This flood was rocking her on her feet, too; she was kicking into its current, proving that she had a say in where it took her, before it could close over her head and bowl her away.
You know you can come home any time you want, Dad said, like eighty thousand times. Day or night: one phone call, and I’ll be there inside the hour. Got it?
Yeah I know I get it thanks, Holly said eighty thousand times, if I change my mind I’ll call you and come straight back home. It didn’t occur to her, up until now, that it might not work like that.